Wednesday, 25 April 2018

I’m rereading Terry Jones’ stories. It’s a
large omnibus I found in Cheadle last Wednesday – 59p! Generously illustrated
by Michael Foreman (I’ve been trying out his wet-on-wet watercolours this
morning, painting silly pictures of cats shouting ‘Apples!’)

Rereading
Jones – of cake horses, cabinets of magic glass and people turned into wood…
and the story of the Fly-By-Night, who changes flight direction by seizing the
whiskers of the cat he’s piloting – I realise how well I remember them all from
reading them to my sister when she was small. I’d go home from Uni quite often
in the early 90s and read to her each night I was there. These stories (along
with Judy Corbalis’ books, ‘Oskar and the Ice Pick’ and ‘The Wrestling Princess’)
have stuck in my head (and hers, too, I hope.)

Terry
Jones’ tale-telling voice is filled with a silliness and endless inventiveness
that’s very familiar.

Watching
just recently the behind-the-scenes documentary about Monty Python’s live shows
in 2014, it’s very striking how much the others rib him about his memory. You
can see him slipping… He’s laughing and smiling at his own failings, trying to
hang onto the words of, say, the chocolate frog sketch. It becomes a running
joke for these crusty old men, irked and busy backstage. It’s a documentary
about cross, topless old men donning drag and other disguises. They talk about money
and the old days and various old conflicts.

Cleese comes out
as the most irked of all. He turns on Jones mid-sketch, in front of the 02
audience, snatching his idiot board and reading out his lines for him. Everyone
roars – and yet Jones blinks benignly and smiles… not quite in on the joke. He
looks dazed. He looks like Mr Toad sitting in the wreckage of his caravan.

And, watching
this on Netflix a few years later, you can’t help thinking – this memory loss
is a serious one. You can see it in his face every time he’s in shot. He looks
sweetly befuddled by everything.

I keep thinking
– it’s the man behind those fairy tales. That good nature, that generous soul.
It’s also the mind at the heart of ‘Labyrinth’, too. His is the voice that
makes the whole thing human and silly and therefore real (‘Come inside and meet
the wife!’) While he’s trying to remember the lines to these silly old skits
and hold onto the tail end of Python, the world of those fairy tales and that
labyrinth and all those fantastic things – they’re all in there, too. They’re
looking out through his bewildered eyes.

It’s kindness
that you read in them, and in his tales of boastful herring, lying tigers and
brave little kids. His kindness is what shines through the whole lot.

Monday, 23 April 2018

This isn’t really a Beach House Book. It
hasn’t been on To Be Read Mountain for months or years. It turned up in the
post and I read it at once: it was exactly the right book at just the right
moment. It’s a perfectly succinct, beautifully designed and presented anthology
of stories about Mars, from HG Wells in the 1890s to JG Ballard in the 1960s.
It’s the first in a series of SF reprints from the British Library; a series
hopefully to rival the popularity of their delightful British Crime golden
oldies.

I
had a terrific couple of days revisiting Mars in all its aspects via this
collection. We are taken from the realms of quaint and gentle Edwardian mystery
through the rather more rambunctious era of Space Opera and into grittier, more
hair-raising days when writers were paying more attention to what living
conditions on Mars might actually turn out to be like.

Like
all the best SF this collections gives us both the cosmic and the domestic
under the same covers. We have stories that are both unnerving and whimsical by
rapid turns. I already knew and loved several of them – Wells and Bradbury, of
course. But then there were gorgeous surprises from the days of early Pulp
magazines. There’s a story I found almost unbearably moving, about a man
stranded alongside a race of Martian rabbits known as the Maee. They live in
caverns and harvest peas, and weave little burlap sacks for collecting them
(twice in this collection, the true sign of a civilized race is seen as the
ability to manufacture carrier bags.)

‘Here in the
hidden crater was the secret sanctuary of the little red-brown rabbit men.’ The
story is ‘The Forgotten Man of Space’ by P. Schuyler Miller. Abandoned by his
own ruthless fellows, Cramer is befriended and looked after by the rabbits
until he grows very old. His own kind eventually find him once more, and
they’re astonished to discover him alive in the middle of a richly sustainable
food source. (They don’t mean the peas.) The men blow up the caverns and here
comes the bit I found painful:

‘The Maee
watched too, from the dark – myriads of round eyes watching from the dark. He
ran with the other men when it was time, but the Maee did not run. They sat and
watched from the dark, till the glare came, and the noise. The black-striped
one was killed. Others died, too – others he had known for a very long time…’

Filled with
remorse and anxiety, reading this. Anxiety because, as I read, I was hoping
Cramer would know what to do for the best. And wondering if I would know what
the morally courageous response would be? Hopefully he or I wouldn’t simply
return meekly to his own kind, implicitly condoning their murderous actions.
Science Fiction – the best kind – always puts us in the thick of moral
quandaries.

In the end Cramer
sacrifices himself and we are told that the remaining Maee know why he does so.
They understand that he’s preventing the humans from coming to eat them all. So
it works out kind-of okay in the end… but only just.

Many of these
stories are terribly sad, I found.

There’s a story by
Walter M. Miller Jr about a man from Peru who wants to work for five years on
Mars, breathing thinly, being careful not to let his lungs atrophy, so that he
can return home and eventually explore the wonders of Planet Earth. He realises
that the changes wrought by the work he is helping with have ruined him
forever. Yet by the end he finds a kind of contentment in the idea that eight
hundred years in the future mankind will be able to live easily on Mars, and so
his miserably wasted life actually means something…

There are other
tales of stoicism and various forms of suffering, of viruses and radioactive
dust storms and intangible Martians emerging from plants to possess unwary
human visitors. There’s a rather lovely story (‘A Martian Odyssey’ by Stanley
G. Weinbaum) about a man who befriends Tweel, a Martian ostrich (one with a
habit of dive-bombing the dusty ground, beak-first, rather like Road Runner in
the cartoon.) The story is really an amazing natural history lesson offered by
a native to a visitor, as they struggle to communicate with a few words and
gestures. It’s a very sweet story, with a few scary moments and its message of
cautious cooperation and exploration stands at the very heart of a collection
that is by turns lurid, gritty, dreamlike and harrowing.

Wednesday, 18 April 2018

The 2002 Spider-Man movie was just about
all right, but some of the changes to the original material drove me up the
wall. It’s the problem I have with all the Marvel Universe movies: as a kid I
reread the reprints from the Sixties of all these titles, and I reveled in the
Seventies comics as they came out. Nothing on screen could live up to the
Marvel Universe in my head – it’s brash, noisy, full of team-ups, crossovers,
star-spanning sagas, cheeky badinage and, at most, four colours, tops.

But
reading the novelisation of the movie this week I realized something I knew
long ago and forgot: ie, through some strange alchemical evolutionary process,
novelisations can come to replace the thing they’re based on. The Tobey Maguire
trilogy of movies has been rendered obsolete by remakes three times over
already, and so the book I was reading was hopelessly lost in time… and yet,
picking it up this week, I found myself drawn into it so easily and happily. It
was like I’d found the ideal literary version of that Spider-Man origin story.

I
suppose it’s because I feel exiled from comics. They stopped being something I
can read with the same enjoyment sometime around 1988. When I was a kid I’d be
utterly transported: I’d live inside each and every frame. As soon as I got to
about eighteen it had to be prose fiction for me, if I was to be caught up
completely inside a story. I think it had something to do with seeing the
limitations of the artwork; of not buying into it completely when you can see
the rough edges of the pictures… And maybe it’s just that I grew out of
superhero stuff? That seems fair enough, too…

And
yet… those characters at the heart of the Spider-Man story are so present in
some deep layer of my mind. I’m fond of them all: MJ and Norman, Aunt May and
dead Uncle Ben. I love the fact that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko gave everyone –
and especially their colourful super villains – such believable back stories.
Everyone had a history, and foibles we could understand. And each of them was
preserved in my memory, from endless summer holiday afternoons re-reading those
old comics.

So…
when I come to read Peter David’s elegant adaptation of an imperfect movie from
sixteen years ago, I find myself reunited with all these people. They’re not in
the Sixties and Seventies – they’ve been bumped up to the turn of the century
(an era that seems almost just as quaint by now) – but everyone is present and
correct. Peter Parker is just as neurotic and sweetly tortured as he ever was.
Aunt May is a doughty and tetchy and loyal. Even J Jonah Jameson is a lovable,
idiotic curmudgeon in the exact way I remember. It’s as if the author is taking
the broad outlines of the movie, and the events, and the relationships and
set-pieces and the dialogue too… but somehow he’s infusing it with the spirit
and the atmosphere of the original comic. Gone are the flickering CGI effects
that made everything look like a computer game, and gone are the usual
superhero movie clichés… and what we’re left with feels rather like a
definitive Spider-Man novel, that gets us to the heart of everything that was
good about that character in the first place.

David
is a class act. This is my first time reading him, I believe, and I’m delighted
to find his prose as fast and direct as webbing fluid – and what’s more: it
sticks. It just runs along effortlessly and takes us with it. He dances rings
around the original material – introducing fabulous extras, such as scenes from
the point of view of the runty radioactive spider who bites Peter Parker, and
Peter’s own letters to his departed parents. The whole book is chockablock with
Easter Eggs, as they call them: little mentions and glimpses and references to
Marvel characters and stories, sprinkled like goblin dust throughout the text.

I
loved it from start to finish. If I were Marvel I’d repackage it without
reference to the film at all and let it stand by itself. And, of course, as
soon as I finished it, I ordered the next two from Ebay (my Beach House
Mountain isn’t getting any smaller.) As I remember, the two sequel movies were
slightly ropey? So I’m hoping that novelizations work in inverse ratio and the
books will get even better.

I was aware of Molly
Parkin’s appearances on game shows and in documentaries, where she’d always cut
a larger-than-life figure; a true bohemian, sporting feathered gowns and
turbans and elaborate eye make-up. She was someone fabulous from an earlier era
who was still around and painting outrageously garish canvases in her eighties:
still out there, still making a splash. I was half-aware that, back in the day,
she had published a string of racy novels. Now, at last, I’ve read her first
one, from 1974, ‘Love All’ and I’ve discovered that it’s a delightful, outré
number… a kind of cross between Abfab and Collette.

Our
heroine is Myopia: a divorcee and mother in a fancy Hampstead home in the early
1970s. She’s a woman who feels the need to please everyone, and so falls
instantly for the blandishments and cajolings of all the men whose orbit she
falls into. What a terrible bunch she knocks about with! They’re all alcoholics
or immensely rich, impotent fatties, or emotionally-stunted MPs or her own
batshit crazy father…! Your heart can’t help going out a little to the poor
woman and the way she lurches drunkenly through her days, swigging brandy,
whisky and red wine,stumbling
from one afternoon encounter to the next…

In
many ways it’s deliciously decadent, and you can’t help seeing Myopia as more
liberated and in-control than she claims to be. She dances rings around these
fellas, and she’s having a splendid time – especially when she waltzes off to
Paris for the weekend with her new gay pal, to star in a photo shoot for his
ex’s new collection of designer frocks.

There’s
something intrinsically silly about all the wish-fulfilment and fantasy and the
coincidences at play in this novel. Everyone who turns up is either an
ex-lesbian lover or a red hot brand new paramour who can’t wait to introduce
her to a sexual practice she hasn’t tried out before. But the contrivances and
the daftness don’t really matter. We’re in a fantasy world whizzed up from the
relics of 1974: from Biba and David Hockney’s ghostly portraits of Celia; of
David Bowie dressed as a pirate in red dungarees during his Diamond Dogs
period…

This is the erotic bildungsroman that
the era of glam rock thoroughly deserves, and I was glad to encounter it all
these years later. Myopia really is a heroine of her time – she’s the working
class girl from the seaside café suddenly pitched into this very sophisticated
world of fashionistas and decadent drifters. Hers is a time when this kind of
social mobility was taken for granted, and anyone, from any background, might
wander into the high-life like Myopia does…

Molly
Parkin’s sense of humour lifts this book up, I think. There are lots of novels
about dreary narcissists having the time of their lives. This never gets dull
and it never feels earnest. It’s someone writing with great panache, and with a
tongue firmly in their cheek.‘We
lay on the bed, Jean and me, naked, covered in boys. There must have been seven
of them, three on her, three on me, and Sergio, that was his name I remember,
he was odd man out. Scrabbling around for any bit of bare flash he could find…’

Tuesday, 17 April 2018

In the supermarket I'm having a look at
the selection of World Book Day Books. Our local supermarket tends to have a
very small selection of books. Usually they’re very popular paperbacks at less
than half the actual price, which is a terrible idea. People get used to the
idea of having very little choice and treating them like junk – but what can
you do? That’s how publishing is run these days, and I’m sure these people know
what they’re doing.

There’s
a Paddington collection for World Book Day, for a pound. The three stories are
all reprints, of course, but I have to buy it anyway. It’s illustrated by Peggy
Fortnum and the stories are from Michael Bond’s heyday. It drops easy as
anything into my basket: irresistible.

There's an older, large lady working at the checkout. Calling me ‘lovey’. When she
scans and beeps ‘Paddington Turns Detective’ she says, with mock sternness, ‘I
hope you’re not going to be reading this yourself.’

I
give her a hard stare. ‘Why ever not?’

She
laughs at me. ‘Isn’t it for kids?’

I
shrug. ‘I’ve no idea. But I’ve got a collection of Paddington books going back
to 1970, when I first started buying books. I’ve got everything he appears in.’

She
beeps the rest of my shopping. ‘I bet they’d be worth a fortune.’

‘I
doubt it,’ I say hotly. ‘Not only are they not for sale, but they’ve all been
read a hundred times. They’re not the kind of thing people sell. They’re my
reading copies.’

‘Oh,’
she says, looking thoughtful. ‘Didn’t they make a film out of Paddington
recently? Did you go and see it, lovey?’

I
tell her that both the film and its sequel were great and more than lived up to
my expectations.

‘Oh,
that’s good,’ she says, as I pack my bag. ‘Because sometimes you go and see the
film and it’s no good at all, compared with the book and the way you imagine
everything inside your head.’

‘Quite,’
I say.

She
sighs. ‘You can have all your illusions squashed.’

Squashed?
I assure her that that’s something I never want to happen to me.

‘You
have a nice afternoon, lovey,’ she tells me, as I pay and she gives me my change
and then I head back out into rainy Levenshulme.

I have read my second novel based on the
original 1970s TV show, Battlestar Galactica. When I was eight in 1978 the book
based on the pilot movie was my favourite book of the year. It just struck a
chord with me - giving me more of the space opera swash and buckle I’d loved so
much in the previous year’s Star Wars. In some ways Battlestar was even better,
with its insect monsters, furry robots and follow-on TV show.

For
some reason it has taken me forty years to move on to book two. Not sure why. I
think I was less keen on the ‘Gun on Ice Planet Zero’ episode that the novel is
based on. However it’s by the same author(s) – Glen A. Larson and Robert
Thurston, so this world of Battlestar Galactica in print is immediately
recognizable. What I remember is the consideration the authors give to the
interior voices of the two leaders – Adama for the humans, and the Supreme
Leader for the Cylons. There was always something creepy about the monstrous,
glittering-eyed being sitting at the top of that plinth, even on TV. In the
books we learn that he has three brains and a mania for routing out every last
human being by any means necessary. I love all the bits of Cylon culture we
learn about. Surprising bits to do with the suppression of written language.
The Cylons are free to create poetry – but they must never write it down. Odd
nuggets of invention like that are what gives this strange series its
distinction.

Much
of the book comes narrated by the criminal, Croft, who is hoisted from the
depths of a prison ship along with some of his fellows, because the computer
has judged their mountaineering skills the most useful for a mission to the ice
world on which most of the book’s action takes place. Croft is a great
invention – allowing us to see the first book’s heroes through fresh (and
rather shifty eyes.) What was on TV a rather duff story about a mega genius and
his ray gun and his race of perfect clones becomes a story about second
chances, self-sacrifice and redemption.

Also,
a story about a fluffy robot Daggit called Muffit – always my favourite
character in the BS universe. He’s a replacement for the actual, fleshly daggit
the child Boxey lost in the first book. There’s a moment here that’s lovely, in
which the boy reflects that this second Muffit is almost as nice as the first.
Maybe, in his pre-programmed way, he’s not as affectionate. Also, when he licks
Boxey’s face his tongue isn’t wet like a real animal’s, it’s dry and scratchy,
and so Boxey has to tell him to stop. There’s something very touching in that:
the realization that the robot pet is a compromise, and not a perfect one.
Novelisations again, proving to be much more subtle in such things than the TV
versions.

My
favourite moment of all in the book comes from Commander Adama, who doesn’t
really take part in any of the events of the novel. He merely pontificates from
his bridge and his office. However, one of his journal excerpts sees him
reminiscing about the things that the last remaining humans have lost forever
in their flight to safety. He focuses on a single space adventure book he loved
as a child – ‘Sharky Star-rover’. When he searches the ragtag fleet’s
libraries, he discovers that no one has thought to salvage a single copy of
this beloved book of his youth. So he spends a chapter trying to reconstitute
its plot, and attempting to account for the power it still exerts over his
imagination.

It’s
a very curious – perhaps whimsical – chapter: especially when it comes to the
hints of possible romance between the hero and his globular alien pal, Jameson.
To this reader the interlude stands out a mile, since it sort of describes my
own relationship with books and novelizations of the past. They all belong to a
lost era of about thirty or forty years ago. An innocent era, in many ways, in
which Sharky Star-rover himself wouldn’t be out of place. Battlestar Galactica
is swept up in the nostalgic yearnings I have for that kind of reading
pleasure. Was any book as much fun or as absorbing as that particular one you
read in 1978..? Is every new / old book you fall upon just another doomed
attempt to recapture that feeling?

I
was astonished to find those questions partially answered – at least addressed
– by Adama aboard Galactica, back in the day…

Adama
writes: “Clearly, Sharky Star-rover was a flawed book, and perhaps some
misguided programmer librarian thought he / she had good reason for not
including it in the Galactica computer library. That’s too bad. Sharky’s quest
for a more adventurous life seems so similar to our quest for Earth. The story
might give us hope when we need it. No matter how much of the book I can
reconstruct, no matter how much eloquence I attempt in trying to retell the
story to anyone, I’ll never really have Sharky again. So much has been
destroyed. So much.’

I
never expected to share Adama’s feelings quite so closely. But in my reading
life generally I feel like I’m attempting a great big act of salvage. I’m often
reconstituting the things that matter to me, and bringing back the items from
culture that other people have chucked out, supposing them valueless. I think I
would be keen to bring back Sharky Star-rover and his blob of a best pal,
Jameson, too.

Friday, 13 April 2018

It's been a while since I've talked about my Beach House Books project...

That was my ongoing, endless project to read the novels I've collected over the years and formed into the To Be Read Mountain...

Well, even though I've not talked about it so much, the project has been going on and on... and just lately I've been reading a bunch of TV and Film Tie-in novelisations that have been awaiting my attention. I've been thinking a lot about the whole phenomenon of the tie-in, and it seemed like a good time to write about what i've been reading recently...

*

Cagney and Lacey - Serita Deborah Stevens

In some ways it’s almost the perfect Tie-In
novel. It gives us stuff that the TV show never did and never could. It segues
perfectly with everything we saw on screen and, as we read it, becomes kind of
indispensible: I can’t picture those people without these histories now. Serita
Deborah Stevens’ 1985 novel, ‘Cagney and Lacey’ is one of those Tie-Ins that
gives us the origin story of its protagonists, beginning two decades before the
TV show ever did. It provides us with stories not necessarily too ‘broad and
deep’ for TV, but too early and too youthful.

There’s
a special joy in getting to know the principal characters of Christine Cagney
and Mary Beth Zmgrocki in their early years. In alternating chapters we meet
very recognisable versions of the women we know from TV. Before their lives are
twined together they are in very different circumstances: Chris having a high
old time in Paris and then London in the Swinging Sixties as a society
photographer; poor Mary Beth is struggling along as a secretary living alone
with her ailing, abandoned mother.

In
some ways it’s a very simple story, leading us through the life changes that
bring both women to enroll in the NYPD’s training program. We get set backs and
triumphs, first and second loves, first collars… and we get smashing, snarky
dialogue – especially when the two women are first assigned to the beat
together and don’t particularly hit it off.

There’s
so much to love in this short, readable volume. I loved the scenes dealing with
Mary Beth’s falling in love with Harvey – the much put-upon house-husband
familiar from the show. When she first walks the beat with a nightstick and a
gun she finds him tailing her in their car, trying to bring her coffee and a
corned beef sandwich. It’s a very touching scene.

I
also really enjoyed the early scenes with Cagney in London, living in a kind of
racy Danielle Steele novel, before what she decides she really wants is a Ed
McBain kind of life. It’s a novel about back stories in which two women decide
what kind of story they want to be living their adult lives inside and, what we
get, by the end, is a rather gritty crime story involving hookers, pimps,
concentration camp survivors, Nazis and diamonds. In fact, though some later
chapters are based on early episodes it’s rather grittier in places than the TV
show would get.

By
the very end, with the women’s promotion to detective status, and the shifting
of their desk to the space beside the coffee pot, we dovetail neatly with the
beginning of the TV show. It makes me rather sad that there were no print
sequels from Stevens or anyone else. There were TV movies to tell us what
became of Mary Beth and Christine in their later careers, but a TV movie isn’t
quite the same as a novel. TV movies fly by so quickly and they don’t give you
the dull little moments of downtime that novels do so well.

Tuesday, 3 April 2018

I've been writing a whole piece about my trip at the end of March to Regen Who Four in Baltimore. The whole essay will appear soon on my Patreon page, but here's an excerpt...

Friday Night

We had a small gang in the
bar. A merry John Leeson joined us, saying his Merlot was like getting ‘a huge
warm cuddle in a glass.’ He threw up his hands expansively: ‘You writers! How
we actors adore you writers! It’s like you’re the beautiful, perfumed air we
drink! We have nothing if not for you!’

They
all said they weren’t really writers – they were artists, or designers, or they
only dabbled a bit. ‘And I’m a vet,’ Syd said. ‘It doesn’t matter!’ John
beamed. ‘It’s all delightful. And I know, because I’m old! I’ve had a
significant birthday recently. My wife was born a few minutes before me and
together we are 150! And if you add our grandchild, we’re 153!’

A
man dressed as a papier-mache Auton went by, dispensing hand-made paper
daffodils.

I
told John and our whole table my story idea: ‘K9 goes evil – his eyes glow
green – and he leaks all the Doctor’s secrets onto the internet. It’s
Doggy-Leaks. He takes refuge in a foreign embassy and holds a press conference
from the balcony. The Doctor arrives on Earth and finds that everyone knows all
his business, and it’s all down to his old, neglected friend.’

John
clapped his hands with glee. ‘Oh, do it! Please do write it! You have my full
support, Paul! Tell them from me! Write in and please do write it!’

We
had a delightful time in the noisy bar. By midnight I was ready to go up in
that lift with all the disco music. Dead on my feet. I felt like I was sailing
through the weekend, very happily. I felt confident in that crowd. My role was
very specifically tailored to all the things I do.

On
the way I bumped into the mother of the youngest member of my writing workshop.
William was about nine, I think. His mum said: ‘He tells me stories all the
time. We’ll be in the car and I’ll be driving, and he’ll say, ‘Can I tell you a
story?’ and it’ll be all about the Daleks and I say, ‘Honey, you should write
them all down,’ and he says, ‘How?’So, we’re here this weekend especially for your workshop. We got
permission from his school to skip Friday and come here because he was going to
do your class. Did you hear him talking quietly all the way through? That was
him dictating his story to me. I was typing it all up on my laptop, and he was
coming up with new stuff the whole time, in response to the prompts you gave.’
She’d stopped me on the eighth floor as we passed in the hallway and I was so
glad to hear this.

It
all chimes with what Oni was saying in her introductory speech. About trying to
give something back via the arts. She said that when she was a kid and she
first saw Dr Who it was Tom and K9 and they made her think of her step dad as
he was dying and their dog. Both are now long gone, but that relationship on
the telly takes her back to them. John Leeson piped up: ‘Affirmative,
mistress!’, which made everyone chuckle. He’d just been telling me about his
running around on his hands and knees and rehearsals and doing The Times
crossword with Tom, and how they had an actual bond. And it’s true – I always
believed in the truth of the Doctor’s fondness for K9. Funny to see these
things come round in circles.

Later on Saturday.

The panels were very good,
and hugely well attended. Oni was in her element, introducing from the main
stage of the Maryland Ballroom, and then Kara doing a storming job of
interviewing Capaldi. Very relaxed and natural, his skinny frame half-folded
like a deck chair, holding forth in a very inspiring way:

‘Don’t
listen if they say what you’re doing is rubbish and isn’t going anywhere. It
really is going somewhere because it wasn’t here yesterday and now it is.’

At
the end he invited Kara to exit through the TARDIS with him. She texted me: ‘I
guess I’m a companion now!’

Later
I was in the Green Room and he turned up and went round, shaking everyone’s
hand: ‘Hello, who are you, and what do you do?’ I told him I was one of those
people who’d sent him dodgy fan art. I explained how I’d sent him a watercolour
painting while he was filming his last episode to say thank you for being our
Doctor, and how he’d sent me a card almost by return of post. I told him how
Jeremy had said: ‘He thinks you’re either twelve, or fecking daft.’ He roared
at that.

The lifts are very busy.
Every floor the doors open, revealing some cosplay tableau. A Weeping Angel,
women with tiny Dalek fascinators on their heads, Davros and once – amazingly –
a whole crowd of people surrounding Peter Capaldi. He turned to look at us in
the lift and he pointed and said, ‘Hello!’ And then the doors slid closed and
we were off again, as if to some other, exotic destination.

You
really can’t pay for this stuff.

I
got the feeling that some people were staying in the lifts longer than strictly
necessary, in order to play TARDISes.

A
girl stopped me to say she was in my workshop and has discovered writing in the
first person for the first time. She always thought she’d ‘suck at first
person’ but ever since yesterday ‘I’ve actually become Cassandra – the last
human being! I’m loving it… but it’s so weird…!’

I
had a busy afternoon, doing a panel about the books all on my own (poor John
Peel had hurt his back.) I get people coming up with their copies of
‘Verdigris’ and ‘Mad Dogs’ – the gay men and the older ladies who have
discovered a devotion to Iris Wildthyme. And then there was a panel with Terry
about Monty’s book, and I end up telling tales about life with Jeremy and
Panda.

After
a noisy evening in a very busy bar I was glad to get to bed and finish reading
my Batman anthology. I was still enthused about Tie-ins and thinking about the
genre. I remembered that, when Peter Capaldi asked what I did, I told him I was
a writer of Tie-ins. I fell asleep thinking: what a funny thing to call myself.